Tuesday, October 13, 2009

hacking Sugar - building sugar on Ubuntu 7.10

So I find myself trying to build Sugar, the OLPC user interface for children. As always I don't really have any computers to dedicate to development for Sugar, but Sugar only supports being built on a handful of Linux distributions and versions. So I decided to hack a little and try to build it on my server, marmot.dudeabides.net. marmot runs Ubuntu 7.10. I found that if I pulled down the newest git source of Sugar, there is an area in config/sysdeps where there are files representing Linux distributions and versions. So I did this:cp config/sysdeps/50ubuntu-allversions.xml config/sysdeps/50ubuntu-7.10.xmlThat at least allowed me to run ./sugar-jhbuild depscheck :)./sugar-jhbuild build is running now. This is quite complicated. Makes me start to wonder about the wisdom of code reuse. I guess it just moves the problems up the stack to a higher level. Instead of trying to make a device driver work, I'm trying to trick some code into compiling itself in an environment that it doesn't already understand.

About Me

I play guitar and sing songs. I have an old Jeep YJ and motorcycles and I fix them myself. I am a pretty good shot with my firearms. I married in 2009 and we bought a 1950's home. I have worked with computers and network equipment for a long time. I am very into personal growth, and am a recovering codependent.